A truly graphic adventure: the 25-year rise and fall of a beloved genre

Graphic adventures like Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry, and Day of the …

Space Quest. Day of the Tentacle. Gabriel Knight. Monkey Island. To gamers of a certain age, the mere names evoke an entire world of gaming, now largely lost.

Graphic adventure games struggle to find success in today's market, but once upon a time they topped sales charts year after year. The genre shot to the top of computer gaming in the latter half of the 1980s, then suffered an equally precipitous fall a decade later. It shaped the fate of the largest companies in the gaming industry even as the games' crude color graphics served as the background for millions of childhood memories. It gave us Roger Wilco, Sam & Max, and the world of Myst. But few gamers today know the complete history of the genre, or how the classic Sierra and LucasArts titles of the late 1980s and early 1990s largely disappeared beneath the assault of first-person shooters.

Here's how we got from King's Quest to The Longest Journey and why it matters—and getting to the end of this particular story won't require the use of a text parser, demand that you combine two inscrutable inventory objects to solve a demented puzzle, or send you pixel-hunting across the screen.

A picture's worth a thousand words

The origins of the graphic adventure lie, unsurprisingly, in text adventures. Inspired by a version of Will Crowther's Adventure, which was discovered by accident while remotely coding on a mainframe computer, husband and wife team Ken and Roberta Williams created Mystery House for the Apple II in 1980. Mystery House was a painfully simple text adventure that offered one big selling point: monochrome line drawings which accompanied the text. A second title, Wizard and the Princess, followed shortly after and added color graphics.

Wizard and the Princess was the first adventure game to support color graphics

These simple illustrations were enough to bring the games to life; even though the text parser was primitive, you could lose yourself in the game world, and people did. The games sold out everywhere that they were available. The couple was so encouraged by the success of their two games that they decided to switch the focus of their company, On-Line Systems, from consulting to game development. The graphic adventure was born, along with its most influential developer.

It wasn't until 1983, though, that the genre received its first kick in the pants. IBM approached the fledging company, now renamed Sierra On-Line, with an offer of $700,000 to create a game that could show off the multimedia capabilities of the upcoming PCjr. And so was born the game that defined the genre, King's Quest: Quest for the Crown, along with the scripting language Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI), which formed the backbone of Sierra's adventure games until it was superseded in 1988.

The PCjr tanked, but King's Quest took the computer gaming world by storm—being ported and remade for several other platforms and rapidly rising to bestseller status. It was the first computer game to support the 16 color EGA standard, and also the first to offer a pseudo-3D world in which players controlled a character—via a third-person perspective—who could move in front of, behind, or over other objects on the screen. Billed by some as an "interactive cartoon," King's Quest seemed to bring adventure games—and the fairy tales they used for inspiration—to life.

The first King's Quest may have looked sweet and innocent, but even the first screen is fraught with danger

King's Quest wasn't perfect, though, and it suffered from a sometimes-convoluted logic and limited text parser. In some respects, the game was harder than its text-only brethren, since it omitted details that were clearly apparent on screen when responding to the "look" command. The issue of identifying the correct verb—long a problem in all adventures, text or graphic—was now joined by the problem of identifying the correct noun (when is a "rock" a "stone," for instance?). Problems also existed with navigation. The illusion of a 3D space projected onto a 2D plane was just that, an illusion; orienting protagonist Graham with respect to a staircase, bridge, or cliff edge proved unintuitive and, in a game of frequent deaths, dangerous.

Enter the mouse

Sierra wasn't the only company advancing the fledgling genre. Apple's revolutionary Macintosh computer was released in January 1984, with a high-resolution display, graphical user interface, and a mouse as standard. It signaled a paradigm shift in computing, and a few clever developers saw an opportunity to extend the usability of the Mac to games. Silicon Beach Software released Enchanted Scepters, the first point-and-click adventure game, in 1984, with drop-down menus for selecting player actions and a text description displayed in a separate window from the static graphics. The real innovator, though, was ICOM Simulations, which released mystery-themed Déjà Vu the following year.

The first game in the MacVenture series, Déjà Vu offered a fully point-and-click interface. Separate windows displayed the (largely static) visual scene, the available exits, a second-person narration, and a tiered inventory system in which some objects could be stored within other objects. You could drag and drop objects around the scene and into your inventory. Other actions typically involved clicking on one of eight choices —Examine, Open, Close, Speak, Operate, Go, Hit, Consume—then clicking on an object in the scene or in your inventory. Often, double-clicking would act as a shortcut to either examine or open an object (whichever action seemed contextually more appropriate).

Early Macintosh point-and-click adventure Déjà Vu

Déjà Vu was an instant classic, thanks in large part to its snappy writing and sharp humor. It would soon be ported to several platforms, finding the most success on the NES, where the interface received major streamlining to handle a lower resolution and controller input. Other games followed in the MacVenture series, including Shadowgate and Uninvited, but none matched the popularity or prestige of Sierra's Quest games. The no-typing, point-and-click concept would have to wait a little longer before it could become a genre standard.

In the meantime, Sierra forged ahead. Two King's Quest sequels followed the first game, along with the first in a new Quest series, Space Quest, which added a comedic space opera to Sierra's repertoire.